The Malthusians Are Back Climate activists who worry that t…

The Malthusians Are Back
Climate activists who worry that the world has too many people are joining an ugly tradition.
Scolding regular people for contributing to climate change is out of fashion. But scolding people for making new people is, apparently, totally fine. Many climate activists say the worst thing an individual can do, from an emissions perspective, is have kids. The climate-advocacy group Project Drawdown lists “family planning and education,” which are intended to lower fertility rates, as leading solutions to global warming. Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian and celebrated climate researcher, published an op-ed in Scientific American this month titled “Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement.”
In recent years, many climate advocates have emphasized human population itself—as opposed to related factors such as consumption and technology—as the driving force behind environmental destruction. This is, at bottom, a very old idea that can be traced back to the 18th-century cleric Thomas Malthus. It is also analytically unsound and morally objectionable. Critics of overpopulation down through the ages have had a nasty habit of treating people less as individuals with value and agency than as sentient locusts.
Malthus argued against aid to poor Britons on the grounds that they consumed too many of the nation’s resources. In making his case, he semi-accurately described a particular kind of poverty that we still refer to as the “Malthusian trap” today. Agricultural productivity in poor societies is not high enough to support the population without significant labor input, so most people work on small subsistence farms to feed themselves and their families. The inescapably linear growth in the food supply could never outstrip the exponential growth in human populations, he argued.
But human societies have proved repeatedly that they can escape the Malthusian trap. Indeed, agricultural productivity has improved to support a British population seven times larger than in Malthus’s time and a global population eight times larger. As a result of these stubborn facts, most Malthusian imitators haven’t come out and said they’re Malthusians. And instead of focusing on famine, they have tended to emphasize humanity’s destruction of nature.
The Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich has been the world’s leading overpopulation hawk since the publication of his 1968 book, The Population Bomb. Ehrlich did warn about food shortages, but as an entomologist and a conservationist, his primary concern was our influence on the natural world. “The progressive deterioration of our environment may cause more death and misery than the food-population gap,” he wrote.
In a description of a trip to New Delhi, he was vividly forthcoming about his distaste for the living, breathing individuals who make up a population:
People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people.
If people, people, people are the primary threat to the natural world, what is the solution? Uncomfortable as it is to say, conservationist and eugenicist theories have long been intertwined. Indeed, in his newly published autobiography, Life: A Journey Through Science and Politics, Ehrlich credits the early-20th-century thinker William Vogt, whom he calls “a liberal conservationist,” as inspiration for his work on population. Here is how Vogt explained his proposal to offer “sterilization bonuses” to the poor:
Since such a bonus would appeal primarily to the world’s shiftless, it would probably have a favorable selective influence. From the point of view of society, it would certainly be preferable to pay permanently indigent individuals, many of whom would be physically and psychologically marginal, $50 or $100 rather than support their hordes of offspring that, by both genetic and social inheritance, would tend to perpetuate the fecklessness.
In the beginning of the previous century, there was simply no contradiction in being a “liberal conservationist” and being a eugenicist. Vogt was the national director for the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which has recently reckoned with the eugenicist commitments of its founder, Margaret Sanger. The Sierra Club, which was initially led by a number of avowed eugenicists, commissioned Ehrlich to write The Population Bomb and for decades operated a program focused on ways to reduce fertility and immigration.
Now 90 years old, Ehrlich still takes pride in the work he did turning population growth into a global concern, even though the mass famine and pestilence that he predicted in the ’60s never came to pass.
“I must admit,” he writes in his autobiography, “that in 2019 I was pleased to find an article in a history journal that credited us ‘neo-Malthusians’ with stimulating ‘thi…